The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Down at the Cape, chief astronaut Charlie Precourt was aloft in a Gulfstream testing the crosswinds at the shuttle’s three-mile landing strip. Crosswinds at the Cape put off the decision about starting the burn until the last minute. The big glider gets only one chance to land and conditions must be right; crosswind limits are set relatively low. The clock ticked down, and I worried that we might have to go around again and land at Edwards. But with only twenty seconds left, a voice from Mission Control came through the headphones: “Discovery, you have go for burn.”

The OMS engines fired over the Indian Ocean a little over an hour before landing. It wasn’t the dramatic kick I had felt in Friendship 7. It was smoother, though still definite. The slight dip in speed, from 24,950 feet per second to 24,479, was enough to take Discovery out of its orbital equilibrium and start it toward Earth. We flew over California at Mach 24 and an altitude of forty miles. The Gs never reached more than two.

As we descended, we gulped various high-salt concoctions that were supposed to help us adjust to gravity again. Reentry and return to gravity would reverse the fluid shift we had experienced. At the moment we didn’t need the fluid, but the high salt content was meant to fool our bodies into retaining it until we were on the ground when gravity would take over and increased fluid would be necessary. For reentry, under our pressure suits each wore G suits, the leggings and lower-torso wrappings that we would inflate to keep fluid from rushing to the lower body from the brain. All of this was supposed to keep us from getting light-headed and dizzy. when we were first back on Earth. The stuff I was drinking was lemon-lime flavored, and by the time I’d downed three of the five eight-ounce bags, it tasted awful.

Falling through the atmosphere in Discovery wasn’t the dire experience it had been in Friendship 7. This time there was no possibility I might burn up. The tiles on the under side fended off the heat, and they didn’t boil away like the Mercury capsule’s heat shield. A glow but no fireball enveloped us as we descended. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have been visible from the windowless mid-deck.

Curt took the orbiter through a series of banking maneuvers to reduce speed and altitude and bring Discovery onto its final glide path. He told Mission Control he had the runway in sight. Two minutes later, I felt the orbiter flare and then touch down on the long Cape Canaveral runway. The main gear hit first, and the nose wheel a few seconds later with a bang right under our feet on the mid-deck floor. The mission elapsed time was eight days, twenty-one hours, and forty minutes, and it was 12:04 pm Eastern Standard Time on Earth. We had made 134 orbits and travelled 3.6 million miles before we rolled to a stop.

Curt thought I should give a homecoming statement. “Houston, this is PS two, otherwise known as John,” I said. “One G and I feel fine.”

That wasn’t strictly true, however. My stomach was revolting against all that salt-loaded lemon-lime gunk. A fair number of astronauts get sick on landing whether they fluid-load or not; I might have been stricken anyway. The flight surgeon asked if I wanted to come out on a stretcher. Astronauts had done that before. It was perfectly legitimate. I said, “Absolutely not.” I made it from the orbiter to the crew transport vehicle with the rest of the crew, got unsuited, and then the stuff all came up. I had absorbed none of it, and my body was now demanding fluid in order to feed oxygen to my brain for equilibrium and balance. I was dizzy and shaky.

But I knew one thing. I was going to walk out of there onto the runway if it killed me. Annie, Lyn, and Dave and his family were waiting with the other families and the welcome delegations, the ground staff and the television cameras – and through those cameras an audience around the country and the world. Going back to space had defied the expectations for my age. I was going to defy them again by getting out of the transport vehicle onto the ground under my own power and joing my crewmates for the traditional walk-around under the orbiter. I drank some water and began to feel better.

Out on the runway, under a bright midday sun, Dan Goldin was saying nice things that I heard about only later: that my flight had inspired the elderly, changed the way grandchildren look at their grandparents, and made future flights safer for future astronauts.

Almost two hours after landing, I gripped the handrails of the vehicle stairs and climbed down to the un-flooded runway. I needed to keep my feet wide apart for balance. The crew stayed close, Curt especially. It was that same mutual concern and camaraderie that make NASA and the space program so special.